He was thinking about the next steps as he ran his card through the security reader and walked through the door to his private office suite.
Where he saw Shepard sitting behind Chip’s handmade tropical hardwood desk, sitting in Chip’s own exquisitely tuned ergonomic chair.
41
SHEPARD
Shepard watched the salesman open his office door and see his chair already occupied. It was a deliberate provocation on Shepard’s part, an information-gathering strategy.
He had the big wall-hung monitor turned on and mirroring the desktop computer. The screen was split, each side showing a night view of a residential street from opposing viewpoints. This, too, was a provocation, and also a reminder. Shepard had bypassed four escalating levels of security to get into the office, and three password log-ins to access the video.
The salesman’s reaction was impressive, Shepard had to admit. His enormous rage was only visible for the briefest moment before it was mastered and suppressed. The anger beneath the salesman’s slick veneer, thought Shepard, was the engine that powered him forward. It was not the first time Shepard had considered this.
He could also see the salesman’s fear, but in a much smaller proportion. A far smaller proportion than it should have been, thought Shepard. This was useful information.
“Nice of you to show up,” said Chip. Without removing his raincoat or appearing to glance at the big monitor, he dropped himself into one of the leather club chairs facing the desk. “Long day?”
Shepard indicated the monitor. “You haven’t seen this, have you?”
“No,” said Chip. “I was in a meeting. How’d you get in here?”
“I told you to let me handle it,” said Shepard. And clicked Play.
On the split screen, two vehicles were parked on opposite sides of the road, facing each other, perhaps eighty yards apart. Each vehicle was visible in the other’s dashboard camera. On both screens, trees swayed slightly in the wind. Raindrops accumulated on windshields.
After fifteen seconds of this, the left screen abruptly flared white as the camera’s sensors were overwhelmed by a burst of brightness. On the right screen, the distant vehicle was lit up with muzzle flashes, silhouetting a dark figure beside the Explorer with a long gun spitting light through the windshield.
Shepard had recognized the shape of the medical boot on his first viewing.
The left camera feed went blank almost immediately, hit by a stray round. The right camera jolted as the driver stepped on the gas and the distant vehicle got quickly closer. The figure slipped around the front of the vehicle with the dead camera. Then, faster than should have been possible, the same figure appeared from behind the rear of the same vehicle, firing toward the oncoming Explorer in disciplined bursts. The windshield starred immediately, obscuring the view, but the muzzle flashes were still visible, closer and closer. Then the right camera flared white.
When it dimmed again, it had acquired a pink tint.
“Blood on the lens,” said Shepard. He’d seen the effect before.
Through the fractured pink perspective of the broken windshield, they watched a new vehicle arrive and the black figure with the rifle and the medical boot slip inside the passenger door.
“Fuck me with a hot poker,” said Chip. He looked at Shepard. “Where the hell were you during all this? I thought you were hot on her trail.”
“I told you,” said Shepard, “to let me handle it. I had her locked down. Eight cameras at her house and a GPS beacon on the vehicle. I followed her on and off for most of the day trying to get a read on her security.”
“Maybe I’d have known that,” said Chip, his tone deliberately reasonable, “if you weren’t playing this so goddamn close to the vest. If you’d answer your fucking phone, you’d be in the loop on operations.”
Shepard hadn’t answered his phone because he was balancing his obligations to his other clients. There was a certain amount of overlap, conflicting requirements. Perhaps it was by design, he didn’t know. He didn’t have all the information. The primary client had always played a very deep game. Shepard rotated the possibilities in his mind as he waited for the salesman to get back to it.
It took him a minute. Chip shoved himself to his feet, stalked to the little bar, and poured himself a short tumbler of brown liquor from a heavy crystal decanter. He made a point of not offering one to Shepard. Then he turned, as if the thought had just occurred to him.
“If you had her locked,” Chip said, gesturing with his glass, “where the fuck were you when this shit went down?”